Unspoken Rules

How to manage burnout 📚🧘‍♀️

Week 2 is often when the excitement of a new trimester starts to wear off, and deadlines begin to pile up. While it’s normal to feel a little overwhelmed as you settle into your routine, building healthy habits now is extremely important to managing burnout. Even though it’s still only the beginning of the term, you don’t have to wait until you’re burnt out to make a change. Here are a few simple ways to protect your energy and recharge this term!

• Set realistic expectations: Be honest about what you can fit into your week. You don’t need to do everything at once, especially when your uni, work and personal commitments start competing for your time.

• Create a clear switch-off: Build a small routine that signals the end of your uni or work day. Whether it’s changing into comfy clothes or simply closing your laptop, give yourself a clear break from your responsibilities.

• Prioritise sleep: When you finally get some time to yourself, it’s very easy to stay up scrolling TikTok or watching one more episode on Netflix. Try to give yourself enough time to properly rest and recharge.

• Build breaks into your everyday: You don’t have to wait for the holidays to recover! Make time for lunch, take breaks between classes or study sessions, and give yourself moments throughout the day to reset.

• Hold onto healthy habits: When things get stressful, exercise, regular meals and time with friends can be the first things to go. Try to keep up the habits that help you feel your best, even when your schedule gets busy.

Work friends are still work friends

Corporate jobs exist to make money. Everyone in that office is there because they're being paid to be there, and the business is paying them because it expects to get more value back than it spends. Your colleagues can be great people but the relationship exists inside a structure with its own rules, incentives and power dynamics. But it doesn't mean you need to be paranoid about every interaction, you just need to remember that you're at work and not at uni.

Every company has its own culture and it changes depending on the department, the team and whoever happens to be managing you. A toxic manager at a great company will make your life miserable. A brilliant manager at an average company can make it the best job you've had. We'd argue that choosing based on people and culture is as important as brand name or salary. Don't overshare early on, don't vent about your manager on Slack after two beers with a colleague you've known for three months, and don't put anything in writing you won't stand behind. You can be a decent human being at work without fuelling the fire behind workplace politics.

The Aussie Corporate

Centre Stage

This week on Centre Stage … our Capital W Publications subcommittee member, Olivia Radford! 🌟

She’s a 2nd year Commerce/Media student with lots to share! 💜

Quick Picks

• Hidden talent? Mario kart

• Comfort show? Gossip Girl

What’s something you wish more students took advantage of at uni?

I wish more students took advantage of UNSW's Academic Skills One-to-One resource! The program allows for students to book a session with an academic advisor, who can help with questions ranging from academic writing to referencing. I used the service for the first time this year and found it super helpful, especially during the first steps of breaking down an assignment. It's like a personal tutoring session, and the best part is, it's free!

Did you know?

Data analytics is the career most students assume requires a comp sci degree. It doesn't. The work is pulling data from company systems, cleaning it, finding patterns and presenting insights that help someone make a decision. That could be telling a retailer which products to discount, showing a bank where customers are churning or helping a marketing team figure out which campaign drove revenue. Data analysts are everywhere because every large company has an analytics function now. Banks, retailers, tech companies, consulting firms, government, and dedicated analytics shops like Quantium all hire into these roles.

A commerce degree paired with SQL and either Python or R will get you through most hiring screens, and Tableau or Power BI are worth picking up because half the job is making numbers make sense to people who don't speak numbers. What gets you hired over the next candidate is proof you've done something with data outside a classroom. A personal project, a survey you ran and analysed for a society, a report you built at your part-time job that someone actually used.

The Aussie Corporate

Sponsor Opportunities

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Career Connect – Mentoring Platform

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First published in the Capital W Bulletin, the newsletter of Capital W, the UNSW Women in Business Society. Read it there or subscribe.